Some days, I wonder how humanity ever emerged from the Dark Ages. An article in the Canadian National Newspaper claims that the Maya predicted Barack Obama's reelection in the 2012 election in the Dresden Codex, a twelfth century post-Classic Maya text from Chichen Itza that is believed to be a copy of an eighth or ninth century original.

(Disclosure: I wrote an article for The Canadian National Newspaper several years ago, but the paper ended its relationship with me when they realized I was a skeptic rather than a believer.)

Scott C. Waring of UFO Sightings Daily, an "honorary astronomer" (whatever that means) and an ESL teacher in Taiwan, claims that the last page of the Dresden Codex is a prophecy of the events to unfold in the fall of 2012. Here's what he said in reference to the page:

What do you see... a black god at the bottom with an eagle over its head. The only black leader in the world whose symbol of power is the eagle happens to be US President Obama. Now this sounds odd, however if you look at the upper right hand part of the Dresden Codex page you will notice a silhouette of what looks like a woman… not just any woman. It looks like Michelle Obama, President Obama's wife.

This "black god" supposedly symbolizes the totalitarian power of control over individual lives and the repression of liberty the reelected Obama will enforce beginning in January 2013. That the Maya did not live in liberal democracies and were not libertarians has escaped Mr. Waring.

I don't frankly see how we get from "black god" to Obama, who, last I checked, was not a deity. What does that make the brown god directly above with the snake hat? Logically, I suppose, this must be the President of Mexico, who is Latino ("brown") and leads a country whose coat of arms has a snake on it. But if we want to be technical about it, the president of Namibia, who is also black, also has an "eagle" as a symbol of power, appearing as it does on the Namibian coat of arms as well as the Namibian presidential flag. Waring makes the same mistake as Afrocentrist writers in presuming that the color of the Maya gods reflects racial skin tones. But the Maya also had blue and green gods. What were they? Note, too, Barack Obama is classified as "black" under the U.S. custom of hypodescent, but in other cultures would not be so identified, nor is there any evidence of Maya identification of races based on skin color.

But, anyway, would you like to see this prophecy of President Obama? Of course you would. Here it is:

Now, as for the claim that Michelle Obama is also depicted on the same page of the Codex, I am frankly flummoxed. Maybe he thought no one would check, but there are no "silhouettes" on the page. (Download the full codex here.) Perhaps he is referring to the hieroglyphs at the top of the page, or maybe the outline of the snake person? If so, either Waring is a terrible racist or he really hates Michelle Obama, because these are the only other clear faces on the page:

Does that look like Michelle Obama to you?

The actual upper right hand corner of this codex page is heavily damaged. There is no image present in the extant leaf. The overall scene, by the way, is not the world of 2012 but is a depiction of the Maya Flood myth, when the gods tried to drown humanity with water. Those blue lines around the figures are the waters, as is obvious from the complete scene, which you can view here.